simonh

For a very different kind of CRPG I'm really enjoying the Early Access version of Fabled Lands on Steam. The turn based combat is quite fun. It's a brutal game though, save regularly and often.

What I was expecting was that Peloshon proved Sky Daughter is Yelmalio's sister, hence Yelorna. That makes a degree more sense to me. I just didn't want to quibble about identified with vs identified as the sister of. I get the impression, and I might be wrong, that the cult of Yelorna writeup in RQ2 is somewhat deprecated. That it is going to become a much more native Praxian themed Sky Daughter spirit cult, with a footnote that Sky Daughter is mythically identified as Yelmalio's sister, Yelorna.

So there's a Yelorna cult and a Sky Daughter cult in Prax, both native, and Sky Daughter is identified with Yelmalio by Palishon, while Yelorna is his sister?

Is this where Yellorna comes from?

I have two daughters and Ive been gaming with them off and on since they were about that age. The first game we played was Mermaid Adventures. They really loved that game and we had a lot of fun. You can even set it in Glorantha. When they were a bit older we played Monster of the Week, also highly recommended for teens. If they're fans of Buffy, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, etc. We had a lot of fun playing through the Fabled Lands game books together. If you don't know them, they take a little bit of explaining. Theyre a bit like Fighting Fantasy, but with a slightly more developed game system. you can play various different character 'classes' but they're sort of skill based. The main innovation is they are "open world" games rather than a single branching story. You can freely roam around the map/paragraph network, returning to locations again and again, and follow little mini "branching story" adventures at locations as you go. They have a code word system that means locations can change to reflect your actions, it's really clever. The books are supposed to only be played solo, but I just had them each create a character. I read the books and followed through the paragraphs, and just doubled up the monsters and improvised a bit around the encounters. I played the books myself first to get a feel for it all. We started on RQG when they were about 12/13. Kept the rules totally light weight and abstract. Focused on fun adventure like befriending trolls, joining the Unicorn Riders, rescuing people. The Pegasus Plateau adventure looks like it would be fantastic. "How to train your Hippogriff". Just don't worry about strike ranks, and if you find yourself looking up the Impalement rules, I'm afraid to say that's probably a sign you're doing it wrong.

Amusing that we're discussing the etymology and historical accuracy of Arthur's title as High King, when they etymology of the term King goes back to Old Saxon. He'd be turning in his grave.

It works by 'painting' on land and textures. All those knobbly coast lines are auto-generated. You lose fine detailed control, but gain hugely in speed and convenience. The mountains, hills and trees are symbols added manually - BUT - it has multiple variants of each icon, and cycles through the icons of that type randomly each time you click to place one (that's optional). So each time you get a slightly different tree, or a slightly different mountain. Very clever.

I figured if even a talentless clod like me can produce something useable it might be handy for others too. Actually, on the subject of online mapping tools Dungeon Scrawl is quite nice, and free. https://probabletrain.itch.io/dungeon-scrawl

I came across an online mapping application called Inkarnate recently and it's really nice. It's only available on a subscription basis, but even the free tier is quite capable. Here's a map I worked up for a game I'm prepping for just using the free assets. https://inkarnate.com/

I'm not sure what recent statements you're referring to, but our bison haven't been bred (or mythically transformed) to be riding beasts, and Praxian Bison have. It seems reasonable to me that implies some differences, at least to the extent that horses are adapted from their wild ancestors. Or maybe it's the riders that have adapted. Actually that could explain Bison Riders.

Cool. IIRC they actually licensed BRP from Chaosium, although the system is customised so much that I never realised until I happened to spot the license notice. My copy is in the attic so I can't double check that easily though.

Perish the thought that a world containing Duckburg Point, Hungry Jack, Prax, Grizzly Peak, Nochet and Gonn Orta should have punny, jokey and real-world referencing names. But sure the Rough Guide does dial that up to 11, just slightly. The Guide is a product of it's original purpose as a way to kickstart a freeform. As such it was intentionally designed to be as immediately digestible and in-your-face as possible, but it's actually pretty easy to calibrate it back down to a less slapstick level and I think a lot of these references are useful. For me, they do provide actually insightful critiques of Lunar and generally Gloranthan politics and culture in a fun way.

You mean like this? It's about a foot across. Genevieve bought it in a thrift shop a few days ago. I've not yet found any evidence of her worshiping it yet. Wrong material for a shamanic totem though I suppose.

Sorceress comes to us, via French Sorcieress, from Sortiaria which is Latin for "one who casts lots", so it's actually pretty appropriate in this case. Seer/ess has a very closely related derivation.

I just came across this wonderful little collection of magical symbols, trinkets and idols found in Pompeii a few years ago. Do flick through the little gallery of photos at the bottom, it has some wonderful closeups of some of the tiny pieces. http://pompeiisites.org/en/press-releases/the-luck-and-the-protection-against-the-bad-fate-in-the-jewelery-of-regio-v/

We need to be trying stuff like that, but we don't actually know for sure how biological neurons work. We have various ideas, but cells are incredibly complex systems and almost everything about them is in some kind of feedback loop with everything else. So even simulating single cells is a challenge as we don't understand all the mechanisms. Having a solid crack at this sort of stuff is one way to try and figure it out though.

We can only predict how long it will take when we have a plan for designing and implementing one. In the absence of that, 15 years or any number is just hearsay. 1960s Herbert Simmons predicts "Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do." 1993 - Vernor Vinge predicts super-intelligent AIs 'within 30 years'. 2011 ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity (enabled by super-intelligent AIs) will occur by 2045, 34 years after the prediction was made. So the distance into the future before we achieve strong AI and hence the singularity is, according to it's most optimistic proponents, receding by more than 1 year per year. So I reckon when we get to 2045 strong AI optimists will be predicting it's on the slate to be achieved by about 2090. EDIT: I don't think there's anything unsolvable about it, I'm firmly in the materialist camp. I just think it's an incredibly hard, complex problem we currently have no conceptual framework for solving.

I don't think we're anywhere close to general AI. I'm in my 50s so "in my lifetime" doesn't have the range it once had, but I'm not even sure we'll have it in my kid's lifetimes. The more we investigate it, the more we realise it's an unbelievably complex and difficult problem, and the fact is we don't even have a general, high level roadmap for even starting to think about building one. We've got zip in terms of concepts for an architecture. All we have is pattern matching, with no understanding of the actual nature of the images and data being classified. While that's an important cognitive tool we use, it seems like it's a long way from being enough to build an actual conscious intelligence. I think as we learn more about what general intelligence really is, how it works and what consciousness is, we'll have a much better grasp of the implications and how to deal with them. Have a good night. I'm just about to start my second morning cup of tea.

I agree we may be in a similar position with AI. If say China has it and we don't (greater 'we', I'm a brit) it could give give them a potentially overwhelming advantage. Imagine a world run by a CCP AI that monitors, profiles and sanctions the behaviour of everyone, globally, 24/7 forever. Back in the 70s (maybe early 80s) someone asked Steve Jobs how he was going to overcome the fact that a lot of old people didn't want to learn how to use technology, and wasn't that an obstacle to universal adoption. He said that eventually death would solve that problem for him. Eventually we'll all be gamers.

I honestly don't know what the right course of action might be towards the ethical treatment of artificial intelligences. One of the problems with that is that we haven't the faintest idea what the intelligence or consciousness of such a thing might be like. We can't even unambiguously define consciousness. One thing that muddies the waters a lot is the tendency to assume, mainly in fiction but out of it as well, that general intelligence and artificial consciousness are trivial. There are even people proposing that consciousness is already universal in some way, and the human tendency to develop emotional attachments to, and also see intelligence and intent in inanimate things is well documented. It doesn't take much to give someone the impression, or even convince them, that a computer script or animatronic toy is aware or has emotions. When Alphago beat the world Go champion there was a lot of speculation that this proved general AI was just around the corner. Alphago was an incredible achievement, but it's several orders of magnitude less sophisticated than the autonomic nervous system of a fruit fly. That's not a ding against Alphago, it's just that people forget fruit flies are the result of 4bn years of continuous optimisation through evolution.

The rights ascribed to corporations are recognised because the organisation is owned by people with rights, and composed of people with rights acting on their behalf. Things done by a corporation were recognised as being things done by or for people, or 'natural persons' in legal jargon. There are precedents going back to the Middle Ages in Europe, and circa 800 BC in India. There have been thought experiments about automated software driven independent legal entities, which of course is a different matter, but it's not inevitable that a court would recognise such an entity as having any legal standing, at least in common law jurisdictions. Simon Hibbs

It was a bit different for me, maybe I started a bit later. I first learned about Traveller (and RQ and in fact everything beyond blue book D&D) from White Dwarf magazine. It had articles and scenarios and reviews of products, so I had a decent idea about it before getting it. We started out just planet hopping using the trading system and exploring.

I have Excel so I think so can be moderately objective, but personally I’d prefer to use something in Google Sheets. It’s so much easier to share things with people. It doesn’t have XLOOKUP but it does have JavaScript scripting and is very powerful.

Last Breath is possibly the coolest game mechanic in Dungeon World, and a testament to the flexibility of Move based game systems. I suppose RQ has had this all the time in the from of Divine Intervention, but I thought I'd post this because I think it's a really interesting take on the problem of character death, or near-death experiences in RPGs. I'm running Dungeon World at the moment and while this moves hasn't come up, it has given the the confidence that character death or even the dreaded TPK could actually be a really interesting event in the game. Even DI is more of a "stop this terrible thing happening at any cost" saving throw, but Last Breath shows how getting knocked down the 0 HP can still actually be an engaging part of play. I'd love to see how we can adapt this to HQ and RQ.

"Evil" is a very loaded term, especially in RPGs due to the influence of the Grand Old Game and it's particular take on the issue. It doesn't have a canonical definition or meaning in Glorantha though, and certainly no special significance at a rules level, even in the various magic systems. We can still talk about it though, just as we can in the real world. The Aztecs sacrificed human lives to their gods, in Medieval Europe one interrogation method was to literally roast the suspect's feet over a fire until the flesh fell off their bones. Does that make Aztecs and Medieval Europeans evil? Does it make humans evil? Clearly it means they were capable of it, but how broad a brush are we willing to paint with here? I think this is relevant to discussion of the individual relationships between members of the various races of Glorantha, because those relationships exist within the context of the relationships between their communities and peoples. I agree it will generally come down to the degree to which they can find common interests and priorities. We can see examples in Gloranthan mythology and history where people of different races have come together because they needed to as a matter of survival. There were other cases where they joined together entirely voluntarily to achieve common goals. There are examples of both of those for Aldryami and Uz too. In any of those situations they worked together and it's quite conceivable that individuals collaborating to achieve common objectives might come to understand, respect, value and even trust each other as individuals. Why not?